


Decalescence

by Go0se



Series: Spaces She Leaves [5]
Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Guns, Hoodie!Sarah, Minor Violence, ark/slenderdimension related violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 12:30:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4391924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three times the girl in the sweater doesn't talk to Jessica and one time she does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decalescence

**Author's Note:**

> Found this hanging out in my MH fic folder a while ago! Not much here but I liked it enough to post.  
>  _Decalescence_ : A sudden slowing in the rate of temperature increase in a metal being heated, caused by endothermic structural changes and resulting in a darkening of the metal.  
> ===

The mask is pale plastic decorated with smooth black sharpie, the eyes ringed thickly and the sculpted mouth covered over with outlines of dead teeth. The hooded girl passes it to Jessica one day without explanation.  
Jessica takes the mask uncertainly.  
The girl hops onto an unused dryer and studies the laundromat around them. In the warm soap smell and dustmote-infused light she seems even less real than usual, despite taking off her red and black disguise and putting her hood down. Her tangled brown hair falls over her shoulders to about halfway down her back. She would be pretty if she didn't look so haunted. This isn't the first time that Jessica's had that thought about her.  
Jessica's not used to being in the city anymore. She's jumpy walking between the unfamiliar buildings, doesn't trust the people passing them on the sidewalk. But she's jumpy in the middle of the woods, too. and at least here she can pay four dollars to wash and dry her clothes and feel kind of human for a few days. She has no idea what to make of the gift. She looks from the mask to the girl's expectant face, then nods. “Thanks,” she tries.  
The girl nods back.  
  
*  
  
Her camera is a constant and so are the videos. Neither of them make sense.  
Sometimes when Jessica dreams she understands them anyway. Her dreams are distorted and mashed together and loud, like totheark. A couple times she wakes up on the dusty concrete floor with an impression that it's all about  _time,_ the bends and misses and memories made in a life. But she has no idea what to do with that idea except remember it.  
Jessica's sleeping less and less these days. That's fine. The girl didn't seem like she'd sleep at all, but she does, tucked into the corner of her mattress with her knees up to her chest. Her irregular breathing reminds Jessica of vampires. It's almost comforting. At least she knows that no matter how off the deep end she gets, this one small thing will be mostly the same.  
  
The girl doesn't show Jessica in the videos. It has something to do with Jay, Jessica thinks. He's looking for her-- for both of them. The girl in the hoodie doesn't want them to be found.  
  
Maybe she'd be surprised that Jessica remembered Jay. When they'd met Jessica had acted like she didn't remember anything outside of the forest path they'd both been standing on, but that was only acting.  
The truth was Jessica remembered a lot. Mostly people. Amy was bright until she was gone. Alex a staticky voice on her phone and then a threat. And Jay, who was all strained lies and nerves and good intentions, surrounded in the feeling that they had been running from something. Jessica didn't know from __what__ but she could guess.  
She remembered she'd been shot. Logically it didn't make sense, she had no mark anywhere and her clothes had no bloodstains, but. But. There isn't another good explanation for fear suddenly numbing her so much she hadn't been able to move, or the splitting pain in her head.  
And she remembered being pulled. There isn't a _good_ explanation for her not having a bullet wound, but she has no explanation at all for the confusion of red light after it. Or the places that passed by in a blur: a forest with dead leaves and a dead sky, a lake so cold she could feel her skin freezing on top of the burning pain of drowning before the world suddenly reversed and she fell __up__ out of the lake as surely as she had fallen _in _.__ All real, all urgent, but with a sense of wrong in it anyway, the kind you get in the middle of a nightmare. Some terrible, terrible dream. And then reprieve: like she'd been given back, except missing pieces. She had woken up half-upright, coughing blood and water onto a gravel path. Hungry and freezing and aching from her neck down, it'd taken her a while to stumble to her feet. She'd tried to find her way home only to realize she had no idea where her home was anymore. The cold and the pain and confusion were only made worse by her being so angry at being so lost: what _happened_ to her? And why? Why, any of it?  
Jessica had walked through the woods like she could find the answers behind a certain tree. Eventually, the other girl had been there instead.  
  
She hopes Amy's happy somewhere, and that Jay is alright. She doesn't know what she hopes about Alex. But she has a feeling it's too late for Amy and Jay, and if it's over for the both of them then Alex doesn't even have a chance.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Every so often, modesty being either something she forgot or just doesn't care about, the girl matter of factly shucks off her clothes and douses herself off in a deep creek nearby. Jessica doesn't stare but it's hard to miss the dark purple marks on the girl's ribs and back. They look like bruises hardened into knots. Deep impact wounds. Jessica had seen ones like them on people who had been hit by cars, back when she'd been completing her paramedic certification in normal society and a kind of normal life.  
Jessica remembers falling and being pulled. She doesn't think the other girl was hit by a car.  
She doesn't particularly _want_ to think of it; it's horrible. Anyone living through that is horrible. She wants to ask-- what _happened,_ most of all, but also who the other girl was? Where'd she come from? What was her name?  
  
Sometimes it seems like the girl never left the woods in the first place; the set of her face or her movement in the trees suggesting that she just grew out of the soil one day, scraggly-haired and watchful and silent. She wouldn't be the first thing.  
She isn't the type of person Jessica asks a lot of questions.

  
*  
  
  
  
One day Alex shows up. Jessica and the other girl walk through the underbrush to the shack together, and Jessica's see's Alex coming through the door first. She doesn't expect the rage that floods through her. She doesn't expect how her hands fly up automatically, then curl into fists.  
He's not expecting __her,__ from his enraged yelling. It only occurs to her later that he probably thought she was dead. When he's on the floor bleeding from his head she backs off.  
Something touches her shoulder. Jessica looks over to see the other girl, who seems calm. She's even smiling encouragingly.  
“He-- he tried to kill me,” Jessica says out loud. Her voice echoes in the shell of the building. She's shaking a little. “He hurt Amy.”  
On the floor Alex darts a hand out wildly, grabbing for the girl's ankle. Jessica stomps her foot instinctively and he curls back in on himself, hissing in pain.  
The girl nods at Jessica. (Recognizing something in her, Jessica thinks, and that doesn't make her feel as cold as it had before.) Then the girl turns her gaze toward Alex, and even though she keeps smiling it isn't a particularly kind smile.  
Alex glares from the floor, pushing himself backwards to the wall with his injured hand against his chest. “You can run all you want,” he spits, wheezing. His eyes are pure hate. “I will find you.”  
“No,” the girl says, pointing the camera down at him. Her voice is rusted and utterly even. “You will not.”

  
They take their masks and leave.  
Alex's cursing follows them like wasps in the air. Hurrying through the waving waist-high grasses spins Jessica's head, which makes the whole thing even less real than it'd seemed before. It doesn't bother her, though. Her hands are still stinging from beating the hell out of the bastard who tried to kill her and who definitely hurt her friend, and nothing bothers her anymore. Everything's crystallized.  
She remembered always having been taught that violence never solved anything, but it seems to've now. The guilt she'd expected hadn't come.  
She looks at the girl in front of her, her ratty hoodie glowing in the dusty sunlight as she steps through the grass single-mindedly. Jessica wonders, a little awed, if this was how she felt all the time.  
At the end of the field they ran into a copse of trees. Shadows shift worryingly. The girl reaches for Jessica's arm, then seems to change her mind and puts her hand on Jessica's wrist instead. “This way,” she says.  
Jessica reaches back and holds on.

  
/ /  / /


End file.
